Can you get infected from coronavirus twice ? The answere is not so clear

Published 26 March 2020 · Updated 18 April 2020

We all have one questions on the new coronavirus. When it
comes to whether or not you can get COVID-19 two times, there’s no longer a
simple answer. Concerns that humans could get the coronavirus, recover, and
then become reinfected have grown because it was suggested that patients in
China who had bad checks and have been discharged from a hospital finally
needed to be readmitted because they tested tremendous later.

“According to current protocols, sufferers who take a look at nice for the coronavirus and are hospitalized need to have terrible assessments acquired 24 hours aside prior to discharge,” Mahmoud Loghman-Adham, MD, a primary at California-primarily based lifestyles sciences consulting company Innopiphany, tells Health. “In the case of the Chinese patients, the patients had no signs and symptoms and have been showing signs and symptoms of improvement.” Another patient, from Japan, reportedly also developed symptoms and tested effective for COVID-19 a 2d time, after being given the all-clear.

It’s understandable that human beings are worried about
getting a critical sickness twice and requiring repeat hospitalizations and/or
quarantine. While experts nonetheless don’t recognise lots approximately
COVID-19, they do have deeper expertise of similar viral diseases. “In general,
patients make antibodies to viruses and turn out to be resistant to a repeat
infection from the identical virus,” explains Dr. Loghman-Adham. “So till an
antibody test will become available, we won’t realize whether or not the
patients mentioned from China and Japan had antibodies towards the virus—and
therefore have been blanketed from re-contamination—or whether or not that they
had a false-fantastic take a look at.”

Current checking out for the coronavirus is primarily based
on polymerase chain reaction (PCR) amplification, which measures the variety of
copies of RNA (ribonucleic acid, a nucleic acid found in all living cells) the
virus produces. “The test can just verify that viral RNA is present in large
amounts, however this RNA can be a small piece of the viral RNA and therefore
not able to motive infection,” says Dr. Loghman-Adham. “The take a look at
would consequently be ‘false tremendous,’ mainly if the virus replica numbers
are less than a positive threshold.”

Collecting samples from more than one websites on the body,
including the nose, throat, stools, and blood, will increase the hazard of
detecting the virus RNA. But this is only carried out for research purposes. “To
know whether the samples contain infectious viruses, they’re positioned into a
Petri dish containing unique cells and the cells are allowed to grow and
multiply. If infectious viruses are present in a sample, the cells turns into
infected and die,” explains Dr. Loghman-Adham. “The take a look at is bulky and
time-consuming, and it is able to also divulge the technicians to a dangerous
virus.”

The bottom line? “Based on all that we realize so far, once
you have got the COVID-19 infection, you can’t get it again,” says Dr.
Loghman-Adham. “But there are constantly exceptions.”

The information in this story is accurate as of press time.
However, as the situation surrounding COVID-19 continues to evolve, it’s
feasible that some records have modified because publication. While Health is
trying to hold our stories as updated as feasible, we also inspire readers to
live informed on information and tips for their own communities by the use of
the CDC, WHO, and their nearby public health department as resources.